Past Works
Experiences
The experiences which makes an expert.
Founder and lead engineer
My own software studio
Own solo run software studio. Developing my own and clients' products and technologies.
- Mobile apps: Expo / React Native development, full stack including pipelines. Bookverse, a language-learning app on iOS, Android and the web, and Goal Maker, a goal-tracking app on Android and the web.
- AI engineering: Python, FastAPI, ML, LangChain, LangGraph, RAG, evals, prompts, loops, tool calling and classification. YouTube AI Search: RAG, hybrid and semantic search, Qwen3-4B on llama.cpp, LLM calls and evals. Bookverse’s chat with a language teacher: LLM calls, classification, LangGraph, MCP, guardrails, LLM-as-judge, evals and vision models.
- AI automations: a daily integration with a real estate CRM API, with automatic multilingual translation and website synchronization, and a daily email processing pipeline.
- Websites: Astro sites with Sveltia CMS, multilingual and SEO, for clients such as a law firm and a real estate agency. WordPress builds and maintenance with Elementor, custom themes and custom plugins. Vue/Nuxt maintenance with DatoCMS. A big performance improvement on a Laravel site with large data, and a framework-less PHP backend moved onto Laravel for a map and data visualization project. Shopify themes. Website management and analytics: SEO, GA4, GTM, Search Console, Bing and Google Business Profile.
- Fractional CTO: strategic technical oversight and guidance for a SaaS platform (Tinybird, Lighthouse, Laravel, Horizon), and lead for a legacy PHP system.
- Full-stack development: TypeScript, Node.js, Fastify, Express, Python, FastAPI, PHP and Laravel; React, Next.js, Vue and Nuxt; Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, ClickHouse and Tinybird; AWS, GCP, OCI, Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions and Nginx.
- Case study: Bookverse: language-learning app for iPhone, Android and the web →
- Case study: Goal Maker: goals and daily tasks app →
- Case study: PHP Data Visualization Development →
- Case study: Digital Agency - Wordpress - New Big Website using Elementor Development →
- Case study: Digital Agency - Wordpress - Website Enhancements Development →
Senior Developer
SaaS startup
The main backend developer in a small full-stack team, providing technical mentoring, leadership and delivery.
- Built the company’s first non-PHP service: entity management on TypeScript, Fastify and Sequelize on AWS Lambda. I delivered the backend end to end: the data model in Zod (shared as npm packages), every endpoint and its authorization, transactions and migrations, a Bruno API regression suite in CI, and CDK deploys.
- Rebuilt document signing as PHP 8 REST APIs: PDFs generated from HTML templates, several signing methods (image, drawn, PIN, by mobile) and guest signing for people without an account.
- Modernization and security for ISO certification: PHP 5.6 to 8.2 within my first three months, AWS Cognito with JWT/JWKS between services, pen-test fixes (CSRF, CSP), per-user S3 file access, and a database migration system.
- Mentored a fellow backend engineer and helped set the team’s technical direction.
Senior Full Stack Developer
Major Australian bank
In the core frameworks team, then in internet banking.
- Core frameworks team: worked on the bank’s shared React and Node component and API libraries. Added authentication to an existing portal, improved Jenkins pipelines, wrote a Node data migration from DynamoDB to MySQL and React unit tests, reviewed pull requests and mentored juniors.
- Internet banking: added a new analytics framework to a legacy Java Struts and Angular system.
Senior React Native Developer
Gym and fitness group
White-labeled an existing React Native app so one app serves several brands.
- Built a proof of concept, then a theme object across the whole (large) app holding each brand’s colors, text, images, component styles and settings. Changing one brand key re-skins the entire app.
- Gave estimates and regular progress updates, and delivered successfully.
Senior Frontend Developer
Online home loan startup
Rebuilt a home-loan platform's frontend from GWT Java to React, Remix and Mantine.
- Took over from the departing frontend developer, learned Remix and Mantine, and built the new MVP: routes, state, backend calls, forms and a component library.
- Read the GWT Java code for the backend contracts and mocked data for prototyping. Delivered the integrated MVP.
Senior Creative / Full Stack Developer
Creative agency
Covered an overflow of work across all of the agency's projects.
- Electron builds that talk to other Electron apps and to hardware.
- Took over and finished an early-stage Storyblok CMS build.
- About 30% of the frontend animation code for a touch-screen exhibit.
- Finished and deployed a backend prototype, and built a content-syncing module.
Tech Lead
Social media SaaS startup
Founding tech lead for a new paid ads product. I built the MVP within 6 months of joining, then led the product's tech team for 2 years.
- Delivered the MVP to production in 6 months, letting users create Google Ads, while writing about half the code myself. The MVP secured a $50k Google grant and helped the company become a Google Ads Partner.
- Hired and managed a team of 3 to 6 developers: agile delivery, mentoring, coding, architecture and people management.
- Extended the platform to Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn Ads, with performance reporting, charts and editing; added pipelines, Storybook, end-to-end tests and Sentry.
- Company-wide: helped move from a PHP monolith to microservices and micro-frontends, improved subscriptions with ChargeBee, and piped paid ads data into Snowflake for analysis.
Senior / Lead React Contract Developer
Three contract clients
Greenfield projects across three contract roles.
- Racing broadcaster: Lead Frontend / React Engineer for 9 months. Led a 3-person team rebuilding the broadcast platform for its studios.
- Telecommunications company: Senior React Developer for 12 months. Built greenfield GIS mapping software for a network rollout.
- AWS tools startup: Senior Developer for 9 months. AWS infrastructure and SDK programming with Node and serverless.
Senior PHP Contract Developer
Government, digital media and startup clients
Senior PHP developer across several contract roles.
- State government revenue office: PHP, Yii2 and Oracle; web services for a Tibco BPM integration (SOAP, XML, WSDL); built the garnishee orders system for the fines enforcement team.
- Digital media company: vertical search across its websites (PHP, search, SEO), and feed ingestion and job queues for its media sites (PHP, Perl, Gearman).
- Group-buying startup: PHP full stack, Agile, Scrum and TDD.
Senior J2EE Contract Developer
Manufacturing and direct-selling clients
J2EE and core Java contract roles.
- Electronics manufacturer: a Java Swing app controlling a PLC over a low-level packet protocol.
- Health products direct-selling company: Senior J2EE Developer.
J2EE Developer, then Senior J2EE Developer
Major Australian bank
Over 8 years, grew from mid-level to senior across two highly visible teams.
- Telephone banking: J2EE development and solution design, VXML, TDD, IVR, and contact-centre and workforce-management tools.
- Internet banking: IBM WebSphere / J2EE development, production support and incident management.
Web Developer
Software startup and web agency
The start of my web development career.
- Content management software startup: Java and Domino application development, and third-level support.
- Web agency: HTML, CSS, Perl, Photoshop and Illustrator.